Headline: A humbler Emmanuel Macron needs to relaunch his agenda

Sub-headline: Crisis over the French president’s reforms is a concern for all of Europe

Macron in neither ‘humbler’ –imagine a humble enarque? , nor does he need to ‘relaunch his agenda’ , a catch phrase awash in Neo-Liberal jargon, as the Financial Times editors propose! Macron’s plans are described in the text that will be posted below, after his mealy-mouthed ‘apology’ to the French people. The police strategy of ‘preemptive arrest’ does not signal humbleness, but shows that Macron shares with Radical Thatcherite Fillon an authoritarianism, Macron’s under the guise of the bloated notion of Jupertarianism. With the help of Financial Times’ preposterous phraseology like this: ‘After vanquishing the far-right in the 2017 presidential election,…’ : 36.5% of ballots cast in the final election were ‘spoiled’ or otherwise uncountable. Vanquish is not the right word, perhaps that old comic movie title more aptly describes the Macron victory: ‘The Mouse that Roared’?

Headline: Police flood into Paris to contain gilets jaunes

Sub-headline: Security forces put 8,000 on the streets of the capital to quell fears of rioting

French security forces contained fears of a fourth weekend of rioting by extremist gilets jaunes in Paris with a change of tactics including a massive show of strength.

About 8,000 police and gendarmes refused to allow the gilets jaunes to gain the upper hand, as they had the previous week, by attempting to filter out troublemakers before they could act. They put parts of the city into lockdown before dawn and carried out widespread stop-and-search operations. Plainclothes officers pinpointed extremist elements and made hundreds of “pre-emptive arrests”.

Small groups of gilets jaunes from the extremist fringe of the grassroots movement succeeded in playing cat-and-mouse with security forces, but were repeatedly pushed back by police using water cannon, mounted officers and armoured vehicles.

The government deployed a force of 89,000 police and gendarmes across France. Outside the capital, protests passed off mainly peacefully.

In a change of tactics from last week, when Paris saw the worst violence for more than 50 years, police and gendarmes chose to directly confront troublemaking demonstrators.